Auckland parents Ian and Linda Williams thought they had made an informed choice not to vaccinate their children, but after their son ended up in intensive care with a tetanus infection they realised they had made a terrible mistake.

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My names are many, yet I am One.-Orion, son of Fire and Light, Sol Invictus.

That's what I don't get. Are these people incapable of understanding that we have things like vaccinations for a reason? That it isn't just some random thing that we inflict on children? There's a reason child mortality rates were so high for most of human history.

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Nullus In Verba, aka "Take nobody's word for it!" If you can't show it, then you don't know it.

I swear, we are getting more and more stupid as a nation. I guess it will just be a form of population control because it does not look like we are going to get any smarter in the near future. God had better get His Holy Ass in gear and start curing some of these kids.

We are getting stupider. Our education system is no longer the school system, but rumors, innuendo and reality TV shows. We no longer challenge our intellects. We text the person walking next to us via a lng lst uv abrevs. The only thing important is winning or at least being told you should have won. We are so afraid of high slides on the playgrounds that we took them down. Our retirement plans involve lottery tickets and our only real talent is spending every frickin' penny we make. On stuff we don't need.

On the bright side, we are doing such a good job of destroying our country and the planet in general that we'll only have to go through this once.

(Note: I'm in the running for curmudgeon of the year. Please vote for me!)

A facebook friend of mine is one of these religious conspiracy theorists (actually, it's more her husband, who shares her f/b page, but she seems to pretty much go along with his opinions)...there was a post on her page recently about newer vaccines being developed for newborns, with the comment that "they can't force us to get abortions, so they do anything they can to make sure they kill our babies as soon as they are born". Or something very close to that. I don't recall the exact wording, but that was the gist.

They frequently make posts which just make my blood boil, but I'm hesitant to unfriend them since we have known each other for some time, and get along quite well in real life; though I've always known they were pretty heavily Christian, you'd never guess the extent of their opinions just from talking to them; they actually tend to come across much saltier in face-to-face conversation.

From the article:"Williams says that he was influenced by stories he read on the internet that the MMR (Measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine was linked to children developing autism; that they contain mercury and aluminium and that vaccines are promoted by drug companies purely for profit."

I am reminded of my very first post at the old WWGHA, back in December 2006 (has it REALLY been over 6 years?!?!?) which went a little something like this.....

Quote from: Anfauglir When He Was Very Young

In the UK, we have a vaccine called the MMR, which has been "linked" with giving children autism. One doctor looked at 12 children whose parents had basically asked him "prove a link". He also had been working on a new vaccine that would have made him a fortune had the MMR been discredited. Most stories were along the lines of "my baby was fine - but then 8 months (or 5 months, or 12 months) after getting his MMR he became autistic". The tabloid press worked the story up. Vaccination rates dropped to levels where they might be a measles epidemic. However, if you actually LOOKED, there was no credible evidence of any link whatsoever - just interested parties, hysteria, and fear.

And then it came time to have my little girl vaccinated. She means the absolute world to me. My brain was 100% certain it was safe to give her the MMR.

But I was still afraid. As I said to the doctor - "my head is convinced, my gut is not". Despite being as sure as sure could be, and backed up with the evidence, I was still afraid. The months of screaming in the press, and the thought that "what if I hurt my little girl?", it all made me fear. Even the solid fact that if I did NOT vaccinate her she would have a definite (though small) chance of death, sterility, or blindness if she caught measles did not help. The baseless superstition had gotten into me and it hurt.

So I do have a degree of sympathy with those parents. Their crime was that they went with gut rather than brain - which yeah, sounds truly dumb when you sit down and analyse it. But I can understand why it happens.

I am in a position where both sides of the story apply to me. On one hand I am studying clinical laboratory science with a future emphasis in microbiology. All the campaigns by lobby groups against vaccinations I've heard, read, and processed and I just don't understand. It's such a simple proposition: inject this purified material into your body and you will be protected from human diseases that have wreaked havoc on mankind for centuries. Done. Simple. Between all the vaccinations for the deadly (smallpox) all the way to the innocuous but annoying (varicella/chickenpox) unaccountable lives have been saved.

On the other hand I lie somewhere on the autism spectrum. I know what it's like day-in-and-day-out to have autism. To me it borders on degrading that a lobby group and certain people are saying things like: "this vaccination caused my son to develop autism". Almost like a search for blame rather than a scientific quest for the developmental mechanism leading to autism. Remove "autism" from the quoted sentence and replace it with phrases such as "homosexual thoughts" and "black skin" and you get inklings of homophobia and racism creeping in. To me the "autism" line has some of the same sentiments creeping in.

Those are my thoughts.

As to the original story:

1.) Usually the tetanus vaccine is grouped together with a vaccine for diphtheria and pertussis (whooping cough). If he isn't/wasn't vaccinated for tetanus he is more than likely unvaccinated against the other two. This is routine in the U.S. but I'm not sure what the general policy is for New Zealand.

2.) Through all my university courses in microbiological fields I have never had real instruction in measles, mumps, or rubella or the viruses that cause them. It's just not important or clinically relevant.[1]Measles, mumps, and rubella have gone the way of polio and smallpox as "things cured by vaccine."

Auckland parents Ian and Linda Williams thought they had made an informed choice not to vaccinate their children, but after their son ended up in intensive care with a tetanus infection they realised they had made a terrible mistake.

The parents are Ian and Linda Williams, yet they chose the name Alijah for their son. I had never heard it before, so I looked it up on babynames.com: The meaning of the name Alijah is "The Lord Is My God"

I suggest that Ian and Linda Williams are deluded. You begin to get suspicious when you read

Quote

As well as Alijah, the Williams have a nine-year-old son and a two-year-old daughter, and Ian Williamson says they did their own research and decided not to vaccinate their children.

"My wife was very against it for her own reasons," he says.

"I have a science degree and my wife since then has got a science degree as a midwife. I was open to both ideas so I looked into it."If you google vaccines you get a lot of pros and a lot of cons, and you start to read all the cons and they start to weigh on you and you start to believe all the things that are said."It looks like a fifty-fifty argument."

This "50/50 argument" has the same level of stupidity as when a godbotherer says, "Well there either is a god or there is not, so it is 50/50.", which itself has the same logic as ""Well there either is a five-legged unicorn in my garden or there is not, so it is 50/50."

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Nobody says “There are many things that we thought were natural processes, but now know that a god did them.”

It is very curious that two people with "science degrees" choose google as their source of information on vaccinating their children over the advise of medical professionals.

I was watching the show The Doctors and they had a segment with a reminder that parents who may routinely get all the vaccines for their children forget to get their own vaccinations updated. They gave a website healthierworld.com to visit to see which vaccines would be appropriate based on based on your age, lifestyle, travel habits/plans, previous vaccines.

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It doesn't make sense to let go of something you've had for so long. But it also doesn't make sense to hold on when there's actually nothing there.

I'm a very live-and-let-live person. But when your religious beliefs have a direct impact on the health of your community, nevermind your children(!!!), I question your mental competency. I question the religious indoctrination that reinforces such irrationality. Hell, I denounce it.

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Live a good life... If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones. I am not afraid.--Marcus Aurelius